Wildfires continue getting worse. Globally, fire seasons grow longer, burn hotter and reach terrain that ground crews simply cannot access in time. For South Korea, a country where nearly 70 percent of the land is mountainous, that reality hits home, literally. In March 2025, the country experienced the worst wildfires in its recorded history. Blazes in North Gyeongsang Province consumed more than 35,800 hectares, killed at least 27 people and forced tens of thousands to evacuate. Dense forests, steep ridgelines and powerful inland winds created conditions that helicopters and ground crews struggled to contain.
The question of how emergency responders reach victims faster, assess fires more accurately and keep their own people safe drives the work of South Korea’s National Fire Research Institute (NFRI), and it was on full display at the Japan Drone and AAM Expo 2026 in Tokyo. NFRI President Kim Yeon-sang and drone program lead Kim-Tae Dong traveled there from Seoul to showcase how unmanned systems have become embedded in South Korea’s emergency response operations. The institute’s presence at a Japanese expo was itself a statement that the challenges of firefighting in mountainous East Asian terrain are shared. So are the solutions.
NFRI’s Mission: Protecting Citizens and Firefighters
The NFRI sits within South Korea’s fire service infrastructure and carries a broad mandate. “Basically, we protect the citizens of South Korea, the entire national citizen,” Kim-Tae Dong explained through a translator at the expo, “and especially for the firefighters’ job.” That dual focus, on the people caught in emergencies and on the responders who run toward them, shapes every research initiative the institute pursues.
According to 2025 statistics, South Korea operates approximately 1,789 fire stations nationwide. Emergency incidents occur daily across the country’s complex mix of dense urban cores and rugged backcountry terrain. The NFRI functions as the research engine behind how those stations evolve their capabilities. It publishes annual journals and works directly with the Korea National Fire Agency to test and validate new technologies before they reach operational units. Hyundai Motor Group’s recent donation of unmanned firefighting robots to the National Fire Agency in February 2026 reflects the broader national momentum toward autonomous systems in emergency response. NFRI sits at the center of that shift.
Drones as the First Eyes on Scene
Kim-Tae Dong explained the role that drones play within the National Fire Research Institute’s research and development framework. The NFRI conducts research and development on a wide range of advanced technologies for disaster response, including drones, robotics, and artificial intelligence. Research in these advanced technology fields accounts for more than 30 percent of the institute’s overall research activities. Among these technologies, drones represent one of the institute’s key focus areas and are utilized for a variety of missions, including missing-person searches, situational awareness at disaster scenes, and support for firefighting operations.
“Before the drone, we needed to find people by using our own personnel, but we needed lots of time and also needed to secure many people,” Kim-Tae Dong explained. “After the drone, we find them first. People who cannot easily be reached, for example in forests, on mountains, or at the top of buildings. We can use these drones and find them first, so we basically can save time.” The institute deploys drones on virtually every missing person or emergency callout, making aerial search a default first step rather than an exceptional resource.
The Korea Aerospace Research Institute developed a multi-agency UAV disaster response system from 2017 to 2020, led by the National Fire Agency with participation from multiple ministries, that established the technical and operational foundation for this kind of integrated deployment. That system features triple-mode communications, waterproofing, wind and heat resistance and SLAM-based navigation for GPS-denied environments such as tunnels and smoke-filled structures, capabilities that directly support the kind of simultaneous operations NFRI described.
Flying Alongside Firefighters in Active Incidents
One of the more operationally significant details Kim-Tae Dong shared was how NFRI deploys drones not before or after a fire, but during active suppression operations. Drones are deployed simultaneously with fire apparatus and firefighters, providing real-time aerial situational awareness and critical information to incident commanders and crews on the ground. The drone operates as a live aerial eye alongside ground crews, giving incident commanders real-time situational awareness of a building’s structure, the fire’s spread, and the safest ingress and egress points.
This approach directly addresses one of the most dangerous asymmetries in structural firefighting: crews operating inside a building often know less about conditions on upper floors or adjacent sections than commanders could know with aerial visibility overhead. Drone monitoring of rooftops and upper floors, coordinated with ground teams in real time, gives incident leaders the information they need to make faster, safer tactical decisions. The firefighting drone market reflects the global recognition of this value, having reached $1.56 billion in 2025 and projected to grow at nearly a 10 percent compound annual rate through 2032.
Korea’s Terrain: Why Aerial Response Is Not Optional
South Korea’s geography makes the drone-first approach not merely useful but structurally necessary. Nearly 70 percent of the country is mountainous, and the combination of steep ridges, dense pine forests, and seasonal dry winds creates fire behavior that moves faster than ground crews can respond on foot. The 2025 wildfires illustrated this with devastating clarity. Even with over 120 helicopters deployed at the height of the crisis, the fires outpaced containment efforts across multiple simultaneous fronts in different provinces.
Anduril and Korean Air Aerospace Division announced a teaming agreement in September 2025 to integrate UAS and command-and-control software specifically for wildfire detection and suppression in Korean terrain, a partnership that reflects how seriously the defense and aerospace sectors now take the structural fire risk the country faces. NFRI’s research mission connects directly to this larger ecosystem, providing the operational data and use-case validation that informs what capabilities the next generation of Korean firefighting drones must have.
Sharing Knowledge Across Borders
NFRI’s decision to exhibit at the Japan Drone and AAM Expo 2026 carries practical significance beyond visibility. Japan faces strikingly similar geographic and climatic fire challenges. It has mountainous terrain covering much of the country, aging rural populations in isolated communities, and a history of devastating earthquakes and disasters that stress emergency response infrastructure simultaneously.
The institute publishes annual research journals and actively uses social media channels including YouTube and Instagram to share findings with a broader audience. Kim Yeon-sang encouraged anyone following the institute’s work to visit NFRI’s website and social channels, where research on drone integration, fire response protocols and autonomous systems continues to accumulate.
The institute’s appearance at an international expo signals something important. The problems that make South Korea’s firefighting mission so demanding are not unique to Korea, and neither are the solutions being developed to address them. When drones fly alongside firefighters in Seoul or Gyeongbuk, the data and experience that produces flows back into research that ultimately benefits first responders everywhere. For NFRI, showing up in Tokyo was simply the next step in that work.